Charlotte Perkins Gilman travelled from California to Chicago in 1896,
spending three months at Hull House with her friend Jane Addams. Their
discussions that summer resulted in a curious cross-pollination, each
woman borrowing from the other, although neither, as it turns out,
finding the exchange quite comfortable. Gilman, gratified by the
intellectual audience at Hull House, was repelled by the day-to-day
visceral contact with the poor. When Addams arranged for her to run a
settlement on Chicago's North Side, known as “Little Hell,” Gilman eyed
the grim prospect: “The loathly river flowed sluggishly near by, thick and
ill-smelling; Goose Island lay black in the slow stream. Everywhere a
heavy dinginess; low, dark brick factories and gloomy wooden dwellings
often below the level of the street; foul plank sidewalks, rotten and full
of holes; black mud underfoot, damp soot drifting steadily down over
everything.” Poverty, in her description, infects both nature and culture,
fouling the city and infesting it with literal and metaphorical disease. She
soon handed her job over to Helen Campbell and moved on to write her
theoretical analysis of the disease of middle-class marriage, Women and
Economics (1899); “my interest was in all humanity, not merely the
under side of it,” she mused, “in sociology, not social pathology.”
